What the heck is 70-20-10 rule?

What the heck is 70-20-10 rule you might ask. This came to my head whilst cycling in gorgeous sunny weather in Cheshire (UK) yesterday. I managed to squeeze 109 kms which was the longest ride in 2018 and was shy of 8 kms to break my all time longest. I struggled to agree with myself whether this is in fact 60-30-10 or 70-20-10. Either way, the rationale is as below:

Spend 20% (30%) of your time generating new revenue generating work (Business Development).

Spend 10% (10%) of your time on admin work (Admin – Everything else).

In fact, when you are in good times, the spent could be 70-20-10. When the bad times hit, you need to increase the % spent on business development, and the split should now be 60-30-10, as you need to work harder to win new customers.

Either way, you only have 24 hours in the day, of which 6 to 8 should be spent on sleeping. Let’s look at the 24 hour split:

8 hrs sleep

1 hr waking up and getting ready

1 hr lunch break or resting – we are so bad at this as we work through lunch breaks in front of our computers.

3 hrs family time

11 hrs work time – if you travel to work, then this could be as low as 8 hours.

Assuming you have 11 hrs work time, then this would be:

7+ hrs on satisfying customers

2+ hrs on business development

1+ hr on admin

If you then squeeze 10 hours of work over the weekend, then you end up with 75 hour work week.

Obviously, none of us is Elon Musk, who may or may not be working 100 hours a week as various articles suggest. He does look very tired and stressed these days. No wonder he snapped at the Tesla analyst conference.

Just putting the thought process I had whilst cycling on here for future reference. That’s all folks! Enjoy the sunshine.